A well-written spy story with a hollow center.
In this noir tale of international intrigue, a bored Minnesotan recognizes a political radical who tried to recruit him 30 years earlier.
At a concert in the Twin Cities, the narrator, an unnamed advertising executive, glimpses a comrade who three decades earlier had shoved him a Trotskyist Spartacist League pamphlet, which stated: “Join the Army and Organize From Within!” That interaction, he says, “changed my life instantly so that I haven’t been able to take anything at face value ever since.” This, apparently, is enough to make him tail the man, whom he discovers is Curtis Macpherson, president of the salt division at a food product conglomerate. Assisted by his gung-ho co-worker Nathalie, the narrator launches an ad hoc investigation, discovering that Macpherson worked as an FBI agent in the 1960s, infiltrating Chicago’s radical circles until his lover, a board member at the conglomerate, supplied him with a new life and a new nose. When Macpherson flies to Lisbon, the narrator follows him, though he notes (much as readers might) that he’s not sure why. In Portugal, he falls into an affair with a gorgeous secret agent who’s also tracking Macpherson and his paramour. The narrator evaluates all the women he meets, spy or not, on whether he finds them doable; when he attends the funeralof a murdered friend back in the States, he notes approvingly that many of the women attending possess “that hungry ‘I’m a sexual being’ look that most American women lose around the fifth month of pregnancy with the second child when they realize they’re bored with their husbands and their lives are over.” The narrator’s low-grade sexism isn’t mitigated much by his forbearance with his unfaithful, harpy wife, or by his love for his sons, beneficiaries of his wit and homemade blueberry muffins.Nevertheless, the author nails the dialogue of family chaos and spousal warfare while maintaining the discursive, hard-boiled writing style of noir. Though it can be difficult to follow the action, regular murders and a capitalist scheme to corner a commodities market help keep the events interesting.
A well-written spy story with a hollow center.Pub Date: May 26, 2013
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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